BIOGRAPHY

​Professor Sir Richard Sorabji, impatient to learn philosophy, started his undergraduate study of the subject at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the mid-1950s with the first 300 years of ancient Greek Philosophy from 600 to 300 BCE. By temperament he found most congenial Aristotle, who combined a comprehensive web of ideas with an insistence on trying to get it sewn up into a coherent whole. But Philosophy needs also the brilliant imagination of Aristotle’s teacher Plato, the interpreter of Socrates, and the equally imaginative Pre-Socratic philosophers.

Sorabji’s philosophical interest had been ignited at an early age. When he was six, somebody told him, ‘You will die one day’. ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, he replied, ‘dying is for flies and butterflies’. But when he put this question to his mother, she told him the truth in the nicest possible way, adding that she herself believed in an after-life and pictured it like a garden. Sorabji read about this over the next ten years, but, to his regret, he was still worried by what she told him. He was later to write about whether philosophy could show that it was irrational to fear loss of the self in death, but that was in a book of 2006 on some of the many conceptions of the self, and there were other subjects to write about first.

After his undergraduate course, Sorabji left in 1959, and became a school teacher for a year at his old school in Oxford, which he had loved. But urged to come back by some of his examiners, he was lucky enough to have as his supervisors Professors Gwil Owen and John Ackrill. As he says in his one-chapter intellectual autobiography,

"The first urbane and ebullient, a continuous firework display of knowledge and references, the second a perfectly matched scholar inculcating care and exactitude, so that you knew that any loose thread would lead to your entire tapestry being unraveled.”

Sorabji’s first teaching post at Cornell University in the USA in 1962 required him to teach the 1900 years from the first Pre-Socratic, Thales, to the great Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas (died 1274 CE). He has been trying to qualify himself to teach that course ever since.

After his return to England to a post at King’s College, London in 1970, he published his first book, in that year, for which he had corresponded with a Russian neuro-psychologist, A.R. Luria, in order to re-interpret Aristotle’s system of memory techniques, influential on the Renaissance. But he moved on to three books in the 1980s which considered the philosophy of the physical universe in different periods and cultures, concerning cause and necessity, time, space, matter, and motion, and implications for human responsibility. These book drew on all four of the schools founded in Athens in the fourth century CE (those of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics), but also on many of their Greek successors in the next 900 years of ancient Greek philosophy, on some Christian opponents in that period and on some subsequent Christian, Arabic and Jewish reactions.

In the late 1980s, Sorabji agreed, after hesitation, to take up an invitation to take up an invitation to start start a project he had mentioned to a colleague 20 years earlier, but only as an impossible task: translating into English from the largest surviving body of Greek literature, the ancient Greek re-interpretations of Aristotle from 0 to 600 CE, with subsequent 12th century revivals. By the 2000s, he needed to compare notes with scholars of the later medieval Arabic interpretations of Aristotle. He also offered interpretations of the sites of two ancient Greek philosophy schools of the period excavated in Syria and in Alexandria in Egypt, whose structures and mosaics he took to throw light on their conceptions of teaching and attitudes to rhetoric and philosophy. After publication of a Sourcebook in 2004, the 100th volume of translation from Greek was published in 2012, by then with 280 collaborators in 20 countries. Since then increasingly, texts are being translated which illustrate the spread of Greek re-interpretations of Aristotle to pre-Islamic Persian, Christian Syriac and Islamic Arabic, in some cases from other languages when the original Greek is lost.

Meanwhile, in the 1990s, Sorabji had turned to questions about ethics and society, first with a book on Animal minds and implications for human morality towards them. In 2000, he finished a book on Emotion and peace of mind in Stoics and Christians, and about how Stoic analysis of emotion could be used to calm emotions. He had brought a US war hero and contender for the Vice-Presidency of the USA, Admiral Stockdale, over to London, to explain how a lecture course on one of the Stoics had enabled him to withstand 4 years of solitary confinement and 19 occasions of physical torture in the Vietnam war. The 2006 book on selfhood followed, and by now Sorabji had to compare notes not only with scholars of Arabic, but also with scholars of Indian philosophy. This was followed in 2012 by a book on Mahatma Gandhi, arguing that his politics could not be understood, without his very subtle philosophy, which was in some respects comparable with that of the Stoics. A further book in 2014 on moral conscience through the ages, focused on ideas of conscience and conscientious objection, which started with the Greek tragic playwrights, and became ever more prominent in western ethics and politics from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards.

For five years from 1991, Sorabji had the privilege of directing a national research institute of London University, the Institute of Classical Studies, which brought together in collaboration a good many organisations representing different aspects of antiquity. He was also able to continue, part time, his teaching of graduate students. Teaching has been one of his major pleasures and he keeps in touch in different parts of the world with many of the 53 PhD students he has supervised. In the UK, he has always taught the general public as well as teaching within the university, first from 1970 at Morley College in London. Then, inspired by the work of an Indian university for its township’s public, Sorabji, as director between 1989 and 1991 of a Centre for Philosophical Studies in King’s College, London, was able to give worldwide invitations to philosophers which included a request to talk to the general public. On retirement in 2000, Sorabji received a 3-year appointment to a 400-year old professorship at Gresham College in the City of London, dedicated to courses (in this case in Philosophy) for the general public. He was also in 2000 given a three-year invitation to mount activities on subjects of wide interest to the public in Classics and Greek and Roman philosophy at New York University (NYU). He continued teaching graduate students in New York at NYU or the CUNY Graduate Center until 2013. One of his visits coincided with the attack on America of September 2011. In his one-chapter intellectual autobiography he wrote,

“The streets were still full of the smell of smoke when I gave my lectures there in October 2001."

A side effect of the September 11th massacre that, as he much regretted, he was prevented a few days after the attack from addressing an institute in Iran set up to promote 'Dialogue Among Civilisations'.

In 2010 Sorabji published Opening Doors, a biography of his great aunt Cornelia Sorabji, for which film rights have been requested. She was the first woman lawyer in India, who travelled through deserts and jungles to secure the legal rights of Indian women living in religious seclusion and their children. In 2014 he self-published Electrifying New Zealand, Russia and India, a biography of the life of his uncle, New Zealand engineer, Allan Monkhouse, who, after standing in the street beside Lenin, escaped from the Russian revolution of 1917, returned to work on electrification for Trotsky, at one time saving his life, and was arrested in 1933 on a false charge of sabotage by Stalin.

In 1990, Sorabji had become a member of the Common Room at Wolfson College, Oxford, founded by Isaiah Berlin, and after retirement was made an honorary fellow for life in 2002. He continues giving talks and seminars there and elsewhere. He wrote in his intellectual autobiography:“When I had the privilege of becoming an honorary fellow of Wolfson College, I encountered the embodiment of a humane and liberal imagination in the design of a college uniquely devised for the needs of researchers of all ages and countries.”